House Renovation, Week One

Our home is listed as a 2 bedroom. For all their lives excepting the year in Hungary, the girls have shared a room with each other, and that's worked out well enough. But Stephanie has long tracked the aches and pains of our house, and had more reasons than room apportionment for pursuing a home renovation.

We're not good homeowners. I like happy neglect. But a couple disasters and opportunities finally lined up enough to initiate the full project--not just adding rooms above the kitchen's flat roof and not just renovating the kitchen and not just replacing the siding but all of it--new bedrooms, new kitchen, new siding. The piecemeal cost of staging different projects over time was ridiculous if we could do all of it at one go; and we could do it in one go with the guidance of a philosophy our contractor has taken to heart: Do it "good enough." I'm still most comfortable in a happy neglect, but this is hopefully enough to appease Hestia for the next bunch of years.


The permitting process took a month longer than we expected it to, giving us time to pack up the first couple floors and move them to the basement. Below are pictures of loose stuff now in our office, and of the bookcases and mattresses against the wall adjoining.

The first week of the project is now over, and after four days, there's no going back. Here are a series of pictures taken over the course of a these few days, starting in what was once our library (and half a century ago, a kitchen for the half century before than) and what will become a hallway abutting a larger dining room.

Below is the view from our living room through the dining room and into the kitchen. 

And here's how the kitchen ended up by the end of the week.

Upstairs, our bathroom will evolve from open chambers to a room divided by two dividing doors into a washroom, a water closet, and bathing room. The architect strongly recommended two bathrooms upstairs instead, but this plan will help the five of us share without multiplying costs.

Finally, here is the girls' room. We once had the tower of girls--a bunk bed for two and a trundle that squirted out for the third. Later we pulled off the bunk and built a bed for Sophie behind a curtain on the other side of the room. The window you see in each of these three pictures is the same.

And here is the view from our attic/sky stage right now.

Dad and Wendy have been tremendous. They anticipated this for a long time, renovating their basement to make it a comfortable space for the girls. It's no exaggeration to say we could not do this project without their help. And now we've taken over their house, and they've given us carte blanche to make ourselves at home there. Dad and Wendy still come in from Vashon for their work-week, but they're sleeping on Stephanie and my much smaller bed stuffed into their office. 

Maybe we'll dedicate a tile to their great help in the new kitchen.

Savary Island

                 An international crossing, two ferries, a water taxi, the back of a pickup, and a young guy named Jesse who unloaded our week’s worth of clothes and comestibles for ten brought us to a house on Savary Island, a sand spit on the Sun Coast across from Vancouver Island.

                Five miles long and almost none across, the only cars on the island had been barged in; the only electricity was gas-powered and much of the water pumped in similar ways. There was one store, a couple candy houses, one bar. And the store was like this: I only bought two grapefruits because I didn’t want to take half the supply; one pint of 2% depleted the shelf for a couple of days. I didn’t quite realize until a third of the way into our week how much I’d handed over when I gave my keys to Dave’s Parking back in Lund—the keys to the van, the house, the job. But for a whole week, there was no opening those doors.

                Our good friend Rachel had arranged this trip. The trip part was a bit of a pain in the ass, frankly, and I’m embarrassed about how much we spent on ferry crossings and the rustic semi-walled house where we were advised to bathe as little as possible and burn the toilet paper, but once we were there, we were so free. There was beach in every direction, and the tide would roll out for most of each day, leaving long stretches of soft sand and water warmed in the shallow rolling surf.

                Rachel and Isabelle’s six year old boy, Tommy, needed watching, and also their little dog (eagles were everywhere; and another of Rachel’s dog had a near miss in the past), but mostly kids carted themselves back and forth to the beach or played games in the house, or took the hike to the Sugar Shack down the Sunset Trail on the edge of the beach.

                On the last night, Rachel’s high school friend Amei invited us over to someone’s house for some folk music. Amelia, always up for something, brought her viola. Sophie knew there’d be fiddling and wanted no part of it. But when Sophie recognized the music, she got up on the deck with the guitars and other fiddles and stayed up there until we left. Besides the long walks and runs and climbing rocks with the kids, playing sand croquet, reading Dashiell Hammett out loud with Stephanie, every day discovering new strands of beach, swimming in the early evenings and waiting for the sun to set right before bed, the music gave us something new and rich to experience, and I’ll remember it.

                Before we went to play music, we had a poetry contest. Rachel’s a poet, and so she and Stephanie judged. Everyone who wrote a poem and didn’t judge won something—Sophie’s poem was Most Memorable, and in fact, I do remember that she quantified the experience in her poem a 6 out of 10; Amelia won best all-around; and Maisie’s won for best imagery.

                Here’s Maisie’s poem:

                Savary Island

                looks just

                like

                a mustache—

                A curvy shape

                one a face

                of water—

                Sea foam

                covering the face

                like a thick layer

                of shaving cream.

                “Oh no! Ouch!”

                The mustache

                was

                just

                shaved

                off

                the face.